Assisted self-service is becoming increasingly common in many types of consumer transactions, most notably in areas such as retail-store check-out, airport check-in, and fast-food purchasing. These transactions are “self service” in nature in that the consumer is enabled by the underlying self-service technology to perform a transaction with little, if any, assistance from a human representative of the service provider. These transactions are “assisted” in nature in that a human representative of the service provider typically monitors the self-service transaction from a nearby vantage point and is available to help the consumer complete the transaction if need be.
For years the banking industry has been a leader in self-service through the automated teller machine, or ATM. Despite the ubiquity and general familiarity of the ATM throughout much of the world, however, the demand for human involvement in consumer transactions in the banking industry remains high. This is true for at least two reasons: (1) Many banking transactions do not lend themselves to completion on a fully automated self-service machine; and (2) many banking customers simply are not comfortable conducting transactions through an ATM, particularly those who have made a journey to a branch banking facility. The result is that the banking customers continue to rely heavily on direct interaction with the human representatives (the “branch tellers”) of the banking institutions, even for transactions that could be conducted without such interaction.
Very recently, banking institutions have begun to explore the possibilities for conducting assisted self-service in their physical branches. Under this model, consumers are able to conduct transactions, at least in part, on a self-service terminal, with assistance from a branch teller if needed. To date, however, attempts at assisted self-service in the banking industry have been rudimentary at best, and the financial institutions are finding it very difficult to conduct these transactions efficiently and effectively in the real-world environment, particularly since the technology platforms on which banking transactions occur are often highly fragmented—constructed from components that come from multiple vendors or that represent multiple generations of a vendor's technology.